Enforced work or autonomous work
In 1916, Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote The Scientific Principles of Management, emphasising enforced standardisation. He would, for example, take a manufacturing process, conduct a time and motion study (he appears to be the originator of this process), break it down into steps, remove all wasted movements, and employees were instructed to follow procedures by rote.
Taylor’s work, in many ways, captured the emphasis of organisational management of the industrial era, which was largely centred on, as French mining engineer Henri Fayol had written a few years earlier, planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling.1
Now, one hundred or so years later, we have moved to an emphasis on autonomous working, where individuals are granted more choice in fulfilling their tasks in the time allowed. This autonomous movement is rooted in motivational theory, which indicates that the individual's degree of self-volition is connected to their level of control—actual or perceived—over their lives. It’s a fundamental condition for motivation to flourish. And the more motivated someone is, the more likely they are to excel. The recent pandemic also accelerated this autonomous movement, giving people greater freedom of when, how, and where to work.
Here, we have the two extremes, as per the graphic below.
From my observations, I’ve seen that effective leadership combines attributes from both sides—not so much at a midway-balance point, but more dependant on what the situation or person requires. And as I wrote in a previous article on the topic of autonomy, Autonomous working conditions need to be applied within a performance framework that….operate within the guide-rails of accountability.
Ray
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*Photo by Museums Victoria
General and Industrial Management. Henri Fayol